That much information - equal to 1.8 trillion gigabytes pocketed in 500 quadrillion files - is roughly the same as:

-- Every person in the United States sending three tweets per minute for 26,976 years nonstop.

-- More than 200 billion two-hour high-definition movies. Grab a bucket of popcorn because it would take a movie lover 47 million years to finish that film festival.

-- The amount of data that could fill 57.5 billion 32GB iPads. (For those of you curious, IDC says that number of Apple tablets could be used to construct a wall 4,005 miles long and 61 feet high, extending from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska.)

IDC also estimates that at this rate, about 7.9 zettabytes will be generated in 2015.

David Reinsel, IDC's group vice president for storage and semiconductors, said the accumulation of all this information amounts to Big Data waiting to be mined.

"Fact is, there is value just waiting to be discovered, and that is where Big Data comes in - extracting the value from all this stored content," Reinsel said.

The study, sponsored by information technology company EMC Corp., is the latest to quantify the tsunami of data that wash over our lives. Last year, the two companies estimated 2010 would generate 1.2 zettabytes of digital information.

Today's findings cover the vast wealth of information that is not only created and stored somewhere, but also "transient" data we typically do not store, such as digital TV signals for shows we watch but don't record.

With the digital universe growing at such an accelerated rate, IDC highlighted the monumental consequences of storing, managing and securing all that data.

The study found that over the next decade, the number of servers globally will grow by a factor of 10, the amount of data managed by data centers will expand by a factor of 50, and the number of files they'll have to process will increase 75-fold. Yet, IDC says, the number of IT workers worldwide who have to handle all that data will barely double.

The driving forces behind the growth of the digital universe: technology and money. Smart phones, tablets and a range of devices certainly are helping people create, manage and store data. In addition, since 2005, annual enterprise investments in the cloud, hardware, software, services and staff to create, manage, store and generate revenue from information have increased 50 percent to $4 trillion.

Other findings:

-- Although cloud computing accounts for less than 2 percent of IT spending now, almost 20 percent of the information will be "touched" by the cloud by 2015 - that means somewhere in a byte's journey from originator to disposal.

-- Much data remain vulnerable to hackers and thieves. IDC estimates only about half the information in the digital universe that should be protected is.

"People are still too lackadaisical about protecting their information, individuals and corporations," Reinsel said. "This is simply unacceptable."

In 2011, the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information was down to

1/6

of what it was

in 2005.

Since 2005, annual investment by enterprises in the digital universe has increased